Hi mentioned at the last meeting that I was experiencing some 'white screens of death' after trying to install a few extensions such as the JCE plugin and the Phoca Gallery.

I am just researching Kunena now and their documentation site explains quite neatly why you might get a white screen with their installation and I guess this applies to most other extension applications too. So I thought I would share it with all.

There are several possible causes of this error:

* Your php.ini maximum upload size may be less than 2 MB, too small for the extension file
* Your php.ini timeout may be less than 30 seconds, too short a time for the upload to complete
* Your tmp directory setting in Joomla's Configuration.php may be invalid, or the directory may not be writable

Due to the size of a component, some minor adjustments to the PHP settings of your server might be required.

In particular on Joomla 1.5 which uses an integrated installer that requires significant resources and time during install. Failure to set these parameters often results in an incomplete install that gets aborted in the middle of it and most commonly (depending on your error logging settings) ends in a White - empty screen.

You can read further here: http://docs.kunena.com/index.php/Technic...rements#PHP_Settings and here http://docs.kunena.com/index.php/Installation_FAQ (both Kunena related sites)

So which of the parts of the solution worked out the issue for you?

Kunena does have a sizeable upload file, so the upload_max_filesize may be the culprit.

For those not sure how to diagnose the above checklist...

Check your upload_max_filesize value in PHP settings. Default is 2MB, but often will be around 10MB (Admin > Help > System Info > PHP Information - search for upload_max_filesize)

Check your max_execution_time value in PHP settings. Default is 30sec, so if you are on a slow server, you may need to change this if the other two options don't fix it. (Admin > Help > System Info > PHP Information - search for max_execution_time)

The tmp folder permissions would have been the easiest to spot in your Joomla settings if there was a problem (Admin > Help > System Info > Directory Permissions - check if anything's unwriteable)

Hi Patrick,

I haven't installed Kunena yet but I am pretty sure it is the maximum upload size that is the culprit with JCE and Phoca Gallery as both have fixes that enable you to manually upload files to your server and then install a reduced installation file.

Thanks for the clarification on where to look to diagnose these 3 issues - good to know!